Portable apps run better with Coffee

Portable apps are software applications designed for—or used on—USB drives or other removable media. When you're set up with some of these guys, you don't necessarily need to bring your laptop along with you—or heaven forbid, lug your desktop box—when you go on the road. These apps range from small, single-purpose tools that have been designed specifically for portability, all the way up to adaptations of big-deal apps that have been tweaked to fit on removable media and not make big demands on the computer you're using them on. Grab your thumb drive with all the apps and data you need, and just plug it into any machine out there and you're back in business.

Because of the way Windows does things, holding much of the information it needs to work correctly in the System Registry, there can be complications when you use your portable apps. File associations—the ability of the system to know which app to fire-up when you double-click on a data file, for instance—live in the Registry. But here's a twist: suppose there's a version of your desktop word processing app on the machine you're using AND on your thumb drive. When you double-click on that document you want to open, you want it opened by the portable app, not the desktop one. But Windows gets in the way and does it the other way. That's when you need Coffee.

While a cup of Joe might be nice, we're talking the application Coffee here. It's a tool that lets you intercept the file association stuff that Windows normally throws to the Registry, allowing you to circumvent the normal file association and direct the system to open your portable version instead. That way you get to work the way you want to, but you don't have to break the Registry by making changes that don't make sense after you and your thumb drive leave.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Windows Productivity, Windows Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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10 Responses to “Portable apps run better with Coffee”

You should be aware that you are broadcasting the Rip-off work of Lupo, a notorious taker instead of the original work by Yann Perrin or Lahire Biette (the original C.A.F.E. developers), or of Zachary Hudock and Brian All (the C.A.F.E. Mod developers).

just to let you know Lupo the guy thats promoting coffee and his own lupo pensuite has a habbit of taking applications claiming to modify it to “make” it better and removing the original developers name and calling it his own. plus if you take C.A.F.E’s original source and take Coffee’s source the only change made is to the name and nothing more.

You’ll find no mention of Yann Perrin or Lahire Biette (the original C.A.F.E. developers), or of Zachary Hudock and Brian All (the C.A.F.E. Mod developers from portableapps.com). The Developer link on that page points to Lupo. And there’s no mention of C.A.F.E., C.A.F.E. Mod, eXpresso or anything else on the page. John T Haller from portableapps.com did a DIFF on the source code of C.A.F.E. Mod and Coffee and the ONLY changes Lupo made were to change the name and add his copyright. That’s it.

It might be time to re-evaluate – I’ve used Coffee for a few months and switched to CAFE MOD b5 yesterday after this story broke. I don’t want to seem like I’m siding with Lupo on this, but Coffee is better than CAFE MOD… CAFE incorrectly treated double-clicks in my programming IDE’s text-entry fields as file clicks. Coffee had no such problems.

Not everyone likes PortableApps and their pre-packaged offerings. Nothing personal…but for me the zips just have fewer headaches. The files are up-to-date and without the PA problem revisions. I don’t have to beg for updates or suffer the abandoned PA apps.

There’s a entire discussion on this subject, that everyone would be well advised to read:http://portableapps.com/node/21686
To say that PortableApps.com is the only place to get a portable app is not fair. However, IMHO we are the best place, as we respect copyrights and licensing.

Maybe YOU should get a reality check. Our PortableApps.com installers download the freeware program while it’s installing. This is actually LEGAL. Lupo Pensuite and other various ripoffs package it within the program, which is a small difference but illegal.

For program such as Firefox, you can’t do either, you need permission from mozilla. Which Lupo did NOT have.

Nothing in the Lupo Pensuite was made by Lupo, the menu is actually made by one of our PortableApps.com members. It’s just ASuite (Google on SF.net) entirely remade. AND… ASuite was built off our Menu.

To anyone who claims that Lupo’s version is “better”:
YOU are an idiot! The only difference between Lupo’s “Coffee” and C.A.F.E. Mod Beta 5 is that he removed the original name, and the actual authors copyrights, and replaced them with his own name & copyright claims. This is 100% Illegal. This is also despicable, especially considering that he could legally have mirrored it, or modified it (even just a little bit) and added his name to the list of developers who had worked on it, but he decided not too, but rather to illegally take all the credit for himself.

I recommend that no-one use this ripoffs “work”.
Hopefully he will eventually be caught by someone who has enough resources to spend some taking him to court for it.